U.S. MSB Daily News
USMSB.com – The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has named Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli—one of the most influential policy minds in global digital currency debates—as the next head of the BIS Innovation Hub, effective March 2026.
Mancini-Griffoli currently serves as Assistant Director in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, where he leads work on payments and currencies. In policy circles, he’s best known as a champion of regulated, public-backed digital money and a vocal critic of loosely regulated stablecoins.
Now he’s taking that worldview to the BIS’s powerful innovation arm.
From IMF Theory to BIS Testbed
In announcing the move, the BIS said Mancini-Griffoli will lead efforts to “explore technological solutions within the central bank community,” with a mandate that includes:
- Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)
- Tokenized assets and deposits
- New market infrastructure and payment rails
That makes the Innovation Hub ground zero for how public money and private tokens will coexist—if they do at all.
The timing is no accident. The Hub has rapidly grown into the main playground for blockchain-inspired experiments in traditional finance, hosting live pilots and prototypes that many MSBs, banks, and fintechs will eventually have to plug into.
A Skeptic of “Wild West” Stablecoins
For the crypto and payments world, Mancini-Griffoli is not just another technocrat.
- He has consistently warned that stablecoins backed by risky assets or weak governance can expose users to:
- Runs
- Liquidity mismatches
- Sudden loss of value
- He has argued that “hybrid” or public-backed structures are the safest path forward—rather than fully private tokens trying to act like money without a public anchor.
Back in 2020, he laid out the idea of a “synthetic” CBDC model:
private institutions issue digital money, but it is fully backed by central bank reserves. In other words, the UX and innovation of the private sector, with the safety of central bank money.
He has also supported tokenized financial instruments—but only when they sit inside a public-money architecture that ensures systemic stability and legal finality of settlement.
What This Means for MSBs and Stablecoin Players
Mancini-Griffoli’s move to BIS sends a sharp message to money services businesses, fintechs, and stablecoin issuers:
- Regulated tokenized money is the main event
The Innovation Hub is already leaning toward models where:- Tokenized deposits,
- CBDCs, and
- Other digital cash instruments
are firmly tied to central bank money and existing regulatory frameworks.
- Unregulated stablecoins will face a colder climate
Policymakers like Mancini-Griffoli see under-collateralized or opaque stablecoins as structural risks. Expect:- Pushes toward full-reserve, high-quality collateral
- Bank-like oversight for systemically important issuers
- Tighter global standards that MSBs dealing in stablecoins will need to track and comply with.
- Infrastructure, not speculation, is the focus
The BIS agenda is about pipes, not price—the rails that move money, not the tokens that pump on social media. That’s where MSBs, cross-border remittance firms, and compliance-heavy payment providers come in.
Inside the BIS Innovation Hub: Projects to Watch
Under its current build-out, the BIS Innovation Hub is running a slate of headline projects that could reshape how MSBs operate over the next decade, including:
- mBridge – A cross-border multi-CBDC settlement network, aimed at speeding up and de-risking wholesale cross-border payments.
- Agora – A tokenized deposit infrastructure, exploring how bank-issued tokenized money can be used to settle tokenized assets.
- Project Nexus – A blueprint for interoperable real-time payment systems, potentially connecting domestic instant payment schemes into a global grid and later interfacing with CBDCs.
These initiatives are not theoretical whitepapers—they’re increasingly turning into code, pilots, and prototypes. With Mancini-Griffoli at the helm, observers expect:
- Faster movement on cross-border CBDC corridors
- More emphasis on tokenized deposits as a regulated alternative to free-floating stablecoins
- Interoperability frameworks that could become “must-connect” infrastructure for serious payment players
The Bottom Line for U.S. MSB Professionals
For MSB executives, compliance officers, and product teams, this appointment is another strong signal:
- The future of digital money is anchored in public money, not outside it.
- Regulated tokenization—deposits, CBDCs, and safe-asset-backed digital cash—is likely to sit at the center of global payment rails.
- Stablecoin and crypto-asset business lines will increasingly be judged against central-bank-aligned standards of safety, transparency, and governance.
As the BIS Innovation Hub accelerates its work under Mancini-Griffoli, U.S. MSBs will need to:
- Track evolving CBDC and tokenized deposit architectures
- Reassess risk frameworks for stablecoins and crypto-linked services
- Prepare for a world where connecting to public-backed digital rails may become a competitive—and regulatory—necessity.
U.S. MSB Daily News will continue to monitor how these BIS initiatives filter into U.S. regulatory expectations, licensing regimes, and cross-border payment operations.
U.S. MSB Daily News
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